Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many teams end up creating products that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. But it doesn't have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different--and effective--approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what's valuable to a user early in the process--to frontload value--by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.
As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 25 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122)
This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Avis

SL

A nice introduction of the prerequisites that will further allow the implementation of agile methodologies. Very well structured and well documented. The assignments are also very practical.

KA

Jan 22, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

It was a wonderful exercise for me to have a unique understanding to the specific people having a specific task. I really groomed myself after having this course in my professional life.

À partir de la leçon

Getting to Great Agile User Stories

Now we’re going to transition from drafting personas and hypothesizing user needs to testing those assumptions and translating what you’ve learned into agile user stories. We’ll step through how you create an interview guide to ask your users the right questions and then we’ll dive into agile user stories. User stories are a standard feature of agile and serve as a day-to-day focal point for driving to value.

Enseigné par

Alex Cowan

Transcription

We've talked about how important these understandings are of who our persona is, what makes them tick, what do they care about. And how do we know what they want to do. We've talked about how you only can get at those things by talking to users, talking to customers, doing quote unquote research. Now, you yourself and probably your manager is going to think, oh God, we don't have time for, we're busy. We're trying to make dates and get things done, and we don't have time for research and things like that. And they probably think that, well they probably think that because they're under a lot of pressure, they probably had a lot of research done that wasn't very good because it didn't have a nice specific purpose, it didn't fit in with the overall picture of what you were trying to do, and you're going to find this. It's natural, if you are having this problem, you're having a problem that everyone else has. And yet, it's really important because, as we talked about, one of our biggest issues in software development isn't that we're not building enough software, but it's that so many pieces of software we build features products, enterprise software implementations, IT projects, so many of them miss the mark with users. So we might as well not have built it in the first place and that's not an outcome that we want here. Now, I'm not going to just tell you this and have you copy this down and convince your boss. That obviously wouldn't work. But what we're going to do over the course of this, the balance of this module here, is give you practice. The more fluent you are in doing these things, the easier they will be for you to do on a small batch basis. Even if you don't have a formal period of time allocated to research, it will become a natural part of your everyday activities. And, you do not need to pause, and stop, and do this get the benefits of Agile and the benefits of all the related techniques that we're integrating into Agile here. Do the best you can as you go along. Keep an eye on all these things, but layer them in as time permits, and that's perfectly okay. So I don't want to feel like you're under huge pressure yourself to do this, but we do another to look at opportunities to do it. So we're going to make you more fluid in this lesson and this module and then in course two, we'll look at ways to allocate very specific, relatively small one weeks blocks of time to design sprints where you'd be able to go in with some very specific objectives and come out with some very actionable results. We've talked a lot about these two items here, personas and problem scenarios. How do you actually go out and learn about those things? Well, the first thing you want to do is frame them as experiments. So think about your Persona Hypothesis, because that's what it is. All the descriptions of personas that we've talked about, everything you learn. A persona is a creation that you use to make better decisions that drive valuable software. That's its purpose. You'll always be learning about it, it will never be perfect. Developing a culture of experimentation around all this stuff is really what will help you actually use these things. So don't try to perfect your personas, get in the habit of looking at everything like a hypothesis, same thing with the problems. So that's step number one. And the way that we encapsulate our current view of these is with our write-ups on our personas. And we saw the template and you'll practice with it in the lesson here and in the module. And we saw this framing of problem scenarios, alternatives and value propositions as a way to keep these integral and organized and, as we'll see, actionable through the Venture Design Process. Now I'll also talk a little bit about a couple of other areas of hypotheses that we're not really going to focus on until course two, but it's important to identify them here so you can figure out which one you're really focused on at the moment, which one you need to texture out and clarify to make a valuable decision. When we get there, this idea of value propositions, the assumptions that underlie them and discovery will do. We want to encapsulate that in a value hypothesis and it's not just because hypothesis are cool that we have so many of them. It's because as we move from this area to this area there is a very, very, there's a chasm, a fundamental departure between these two things. The reason is the yellow Walkman. For those of you that may not know what a Walkman is. It is a, is and was, I guess a device that played magnetic tape so you could listen to music on the go. And Sony had this idea of introducing a yellow version of the Walkman. The first version was black. And so they held a focus group which is something that big companies do when they want to have people off the street tell them what they want to hear. And they ask them hey, would you prefer the yellow Walkman or the black Walkman and tell us about why. And everybody said oh, I would love the yellow Walkman. And I would prefer it over the black one and here's why and they went on about this and then they got their 30 bucks or whatever. And on the way out someone else asked they okay, hey, by the way as a bonus for being such good participants you can take a Walkman, a black one or a yellow one. And guess what happened? Everybody took the black Walkman. It's kind of shocking, right? Why did they tell everybody they wanted the yellow Walkman and then take the black one? It shows obviously that the research was pretty flawed and wasteful. And I think that the reason is, number one, they don't want to make the moderator feel bad. Clearly the moderator wanted to make this yellow Walkman, or the people who hired them did, and if you ask a customer, hey, would you like this product of mine, they'll always say yes. And why? Because they don't want to make you feel bad, they don't want to argue with you. Let's go back to the focus group participants. What they really want is to get their $30, go home, and watch Homeland season three, or whatever's on television at that point. And then they know that the thing that get's them home watching TV the fastest is, a yes, that a no is going to resolve these questions and arguments. Why don' t you like our thing. So unfortunately when you're researching your value hypothesis, which is this question of is your proposition better enough then that alternatives to trigger a buying, a usage decision? You can't directly ask the subjects these questions. For the persona hypothesis, the problem hypothesis, you can ask them things. You can ask them how many times a month do you eat potatoes? You'll get that. You can ask them, tell me about your work day yesterday and you'll get that. It's not that hard to do it. And you can even ask them, tell me about how you feel when you go to the dentist, or tell me about the last time you went to the dentist. They tell you about it and then you ask them how they felt. And you'll get that answer. But you cannot ask them would you like this feature, would you like this product. You have to create a decision for them. And we'll talk about the difference between testing usability and testing motivation as we conclude here and transition to course two. But suffice to say for the moment that the techniques we're learning about here are good for the problem and the persona hypothesis, not good for the value hypothesis. We have a different set of techniques we'll use to put decisions in front of the user, and that'll help us get information about what they're actually going to prefer in practice. And the way that we stitch this stuff together with the value hypothesis is that product, that future hypothesis that we saw previously. I will close with mention of a couple of other hypothesis areas that we will also principally focus on in course two. But are worth mentioning here in case you're confused about well what are we trying to do here, what are these tools that we're learning good for, and what areas should we use something different. Here you need to use evidentiary experiments, the kind of things they do in lean startup, if you're familiar with that. We'll learn about how to do that in course two. We also have a customer creation hypothesis, which is if we market to the customer in a certain way or promote the product in a certain way, then the customer will respond and buy or click through. Those hypotheses also require a different set of techniques and they probably want to go over here. These things will certainly help you make better decisions in this area but the techniques to test these types of hypotheses on customer creation are different. And then we have the usability hypothesis, which is also different. Motivation is one thing. Does the customer want a proposition that we have, and we'll learn how to test that. And then usability is a related, but different thing. And we'll talk about the fraud curve later, and how those two things interplay to create actionable events for users. But your usability hypothesis, if we put a red button here, the user will find it and use it in a way we expect. Those are best tested through a set of techniques we'll learn about in courses two and course four about testing. So, as we go through here, we're going to learn more about how to create guides and conduct interviews to texture out and improve our persona hypothesis and our problem hypothesis.